Book Sorting: Non-fiction

So I got through all the non-fiction last night. Mostly. I took it all off the shelves, and now it doesn't quite... fit. Despite weeding and shelving two deep. (Yes, I actually purged about 30 books. And discovered that, damn it, I already owned The Guns of August. But only 3 duplicates out of probably 400 or 450 books wasn't bad.)

The end result is that I'm looking at about 90 nonfiction books and 23 textbooks, including languages I've already taken. I excluded textbooks I remember reading that weren't math books, so I'm left with a couple of logic books, yoga and tai chi, calculus, statistics, physics, chemistry, and organic chemistry. (The organic chemistry text is huge, and given organic chemistry's reputation, I'm intending to save it until at least after calculus and the general chemistry text.) I also have German, French, Russian, and Latin. (I may be forgetting something. Photography, maybe?) Yoga and tai chi I think will be problematic; I can't very well do five chapters of one of them in a week, so I may have to incorporate them into the 1.5 hours of planned exercise a week.

Reference materials (and some miscellaneous over-sized books) got shelved in the corner bookshelf. I'm ambivalent about putting reference materials somewhere less accessible, but the dictionaries are what I use the most often, and they're still easy to get to. The textbooks and "how to" books that I've either already read or am not planning to (being in that I got them as reference materials) went on the lowest shelf of the left-most bookcase, which is larger and is basically double stacked. The textbooks I am going to go through are on the shelf above those.

The rest of the non-fiction - that is, basically, books that aren't in the G's, K's, Q's, S's, and T's - I shelved with stuff I've read behind stuff I haven't read by the same topic, with slips of paper in stuff I haven't read. They're on the top three shelves of the left bookcase, plus about fifteen books I haven't found room for yet. Most of it is history, but there's also some philosophy, and things like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. (I really wish I still had a copy of Leviathan, actually. Or my fourth semester German textbook. Anywho.)

And I discovered that, well, I really do think in LC at this point. The problem is more that I think in the alphabet letters, and not the numeric divisions below them. (Except in the S's. S, SB, SF, horse training before veterinary texts... So many S's in our library...) But the textbooks and reference are both in roughly A-Z order, although given the space I put reference into, it's a little... different.

But the three shelves of history? They're basically in approximately chronological order: classical history, then medieval, renaissance, early modern, the enlightenment, the post-French Revolution/pre-Bismarck central European texts, WWI, WWII, Korean War, although the Depression and the 1950s and the American South and historiography of the Holocaust (all classes I took) are jammed in there too. Biography should probably have been in the C's, but I put it where I had room for it. So I guess history in my head is still the 900s, rather than C, D, E, and F.

Once I get everything read, I can go and make it all pretty again.

Assuming, of course, I can cram in two more bookshelves so it all fits.

Tonight: The fiction. (Should be faster, since my method is going to be "to read" and "already read/not reading" and then alphabetical by author. And I already pulled the computer table out of the bedroom so I have room to work.)